


the phoenix of my right hand

by lesbianbirds



Series: character studies [4]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, F/F, F/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Purple Prose, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, hmm what else to put here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-14
Updated: 2021-01-14
Packaged: 2021-03-18 17:35:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,709
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28747029
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lesbianbirds/pseuds/lesbianbirds
Summary: Agnes has spent half her life waiting for the devil to show up in her living room. She'd wash her hair for it, put on some music, sit cross-legged and terrified.or; a messiah’s preoccupation with the nature of holiness
Relationships: Agnes Montague/Gertrude Robinson, Jack Barnabas/Agnes Montague
Series: character studies [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1965208
Comments: 4
Kudos: 12





	the phoenix of my right hand

**Author's Note:**

> thank you to my brillant beta hecate, who you can find on tumblr at @drumkonwords! the credit for the title goes to sacrifices  
> by richard jones, suggested to me by sam. 
> 
> warnings: destolation-typical nastiness, web-typical nastiness, allusions to character death, copious amounts of flowery prose

Agnes had always liked the idea of mutually assured destruction, so really it’s only fitting somehow that it’s how she will die, a cosmic punchline, or maybe the final line of a poem. One of them will flinch and break and then the flames will get them both. It is inevitable that she will die by fire, the type that flickers in front of her and burns in her throat and behind her teeth. It has always been how this strange dance will end. It has always been her fate. 

Maybe this is why Agnes does not look fully into the fire when she prays. Or maybe her divinity forbids her from it; even angels cannot look at the face of Gd, and messiahs are something less than that. 

All she can do is kneel and breathe in like the smoke does not taste sweet on her tongue.

Fire is holy, cleansing, torturous. It absolves and sentences, purifies and punishes. Agnes is not a contradictory person. She is just a facsimile of a God, and that has condemned her.

Agnes used to fall asleep to her candles fizzling out late at night, intimately familiar with the flare and loss of light. She waited as they went out one by one, and fell asleep comforted by the reminder of holiness, of survival. She knew the heat of them after all, even if she couldn’t quite feel the warmth. Her skin didn’t melt and drip onto the candles like that of the other cultists, so she could cup them without worry of putting the flame out. This turns out to be a blessing, because Agnes is so very cold, and all her warmth is stolen. 

Sometimes Agnes imagines doubt as an impurity that can be burnt out. When that doesn’t work she digs her fingers into the soft wax-flesh of her stomach and comes away with trembling fingers and still that doubt, twisting behind her teeth, too quick to catch. 

It is by the light of those candles that Agnes learns that no matter how much she reshapes her flesh, no matter how much wax gathers under her nails, nobody looks at her and sees something worth loving. 

*

Agnes prayed once. Not to a fire, cross-legged and dripping wax, but with bent knees and clasped hands and fumbling words read from a phone screen. She did not pray from a belief that there was some higher power other than the one that curled in her bones.

Instead it was a hopeless plea for redemption, forgiveness, for someone who could cup her face and kiss her forehead. 

Praying didn’t work. Agnes didn’t get her salvation, just bruises on her knees and an ache in her throat. Still, she stayed in that oddly peaceful pose for a bit, shoulders shaking from laughter at the picture she made. An imperfect messiah, praying to a Gd she did not know existed instead of the one that had pressed divinity into her tongue. 

She never did have faith. Instead she had her hunger, and she kept on losing bits of herself to it, to the gaping pit in her stomach that she had moulded her _waxfleshbone_ around. 

(Agnes has spent half her life waiting for the devil to show up in her living room. She'd wash her hair for it, put on some music, sit cross-legged and terrified.)

*

Raymond Fielding had gone to church every Sunday.

Sometimes Agnes wondered if he resented her refusal to go with him, but she could never quite step foot in one without listening to how the echoes of her footsteps rang with false holiness. Perhaps that was what convinced him to fear her for good. Agnes would like to think so, that he had been offered some proof of her divinity first, tangible, blood-soaked evidence of her cruelty. That it wasn’t laid out on her skin for all to see; here, look at her inhumanity, look at her look at her look at her. 

(A priest once stepped foot on Hill Top Road. Agnes had laughed to herself when she heard of it, and wondered if he knew this was what faith always got you. 

He deserved what he got, really, trespassing on the site of her childhood years and saying there was some impurity to purge instead of her burning divinity, instead of the stain she had left behind.)

*

Her years at Hill Top had been odd, drowned in the syrup-slow haze left behind from all the fear that crowded the hallways and sunk into her throat. She remembered passing through the hallways as a ghost, unseen and untapped to. 

Token attempts were made to bend and chat, of course, but rarely with kindness or thought. 

Ronald Sinclair had a calm, measured voice and had stiffened only slightly when she kissed his cheek. She did not, looking back on it, quite understand why she had chosen to bestow her protection to him as she did to Jack Barnabas, so many years later. At the time it had seemed like a joke, a rebellion, an attempt at kindness that was both; look at the cruel messiah stealing away another’s sacrifice. 

Maybe she’d had some sort of childish, passing crush on him. 

Maybe she’d understood what it meant, to be controlled. The delicacy of the Mother did not suit her clumsy attempts at forest fires. 

Maybe she’d just wanted to repent. 

(This is what she learnt; in time; her touch always burns. This can be a blessing, an outstretched wing of protection, a shield. After all, it is painful, to be touched with tenderness. It leaves a mark.)

*

Agnes' eyes aren’t her own these days. They’re real, not wax; she’s touched them, blinking away the burning sensation from her dry fingertips, startled at the lack of change from the pressure. She learns this in a motel bathroom with bile in throat and candles of flesh and hair burning behind her. When she presses her fingers to eyelids, they do not feel like her own.

When she stares into the mirror in the motel bathroom, she tries not to think about who is looking back.

“I am sorry, oh exalted one, oh burning one,” Agnes whispered, fingers white on the sink and voice tight with shame, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I haven’t prayed in days and cannot think of this as a sin but as a choice. This was foolish, and I accept my punishment with grave but please, burn me free from this. Unbind me, unbind me, unbind me. I ask this of you so you can free me from my doubts and from the chain around my neck. I ask this of you as your faithful worshipper, as your outstretched arm.”

Love is a choice. What happened between her and Gertrude was a twisting, delicate connection, but one they fell into and bound into. If given a choice, perhaps Agnes could have loved her without cobwebs in her kisses. If given a choice, perhaps she could hold her and not think of- 

Agnes didn’t like being trapped. She didn’t like being watched. This did not change anything. 

Gertrude did not know her. She did not learn her many-throated body, the hymns she sang with such terrible passion, the way she cried when she praised her God. This is a tragedy. This is the fate of all holy things. Angels are not built along the same lines as humans, they are not grown right, not cultivated carefully until they are beautiful.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t love you properly,” Agnes tells dirty sinks and stained tiles and the burning feeling in her neck, “I tried, I promise I tried, but it just wasn’t right. And we’re not getting any second chances.”

*

Jude had loved her and Jude had worshipped her, prayers on her lips and bruises on herknees, but Agnes knows first hand how hard it is to love something holy and burning. Agnes leaves coal-black fingerprints and burnt skin on everything she touches. She is not marking or claiming. She is just ruining. 

In another world, Jude does not learn that there is only joy in burning, that it is a choice between smelling your own flesh go up in flames or enjoying the ashes of another. In kinder world, she learns that there is no love in worship, and instead kisses her girlfriend’s lips and laughs and dances with joy.

That is not this world. That is not the world Agnes will shape with her fragile wrists and gentle cruelty. 

Sometimes Agnes feels that she had spent her whole life waiting for the moment where she gave up, where she gave in, where she crumpled under the weight. She feels like she is made of weak knees and fragile shoulders and that she had shaped herself all wrong. 

When she dreams she sees images of a wasteland and feels how the empty, purified ground welcomes her. Sees that all impurities have been purged in the holy light she had brought, that she had spread her wings and opened her arms and anchored a new sun in the sky.

There is no water in the ground, for the earth does not want it anymore. This is the future she will usher in, this is the future her mother dreamed of.

It will come. 

It was not a question of if or when, but how; which way would she fall? This way, into the uncaring, freezing arms of numbness, or into the embrace of destruction and the promises it whispered in her ear, dogging her footsteps like a shadow, pressed close like a lover. 

Her wings will be wilted when she does, and she will be rendered flightless and marked with her failure and doubt. This will make her mortal, if not human. 

*

Agnes is not, strictly speaking, a person. She is a figurehead and a messiah, larger than life and better for it. She is chosen, special, apart from the rest, skin clean from the welcoming burn of fire, her first clumsily shaped letter carved into stone. The cult took her childhood drawings and took them as messages from the god and when she dyed her hair, sixteen and angry, it was an omen.

Here’s the thing; Icarus had an angel’s wing strapped upon his back, dripping from the fiery touch of the sun. This was his punishment for daring to challenge the gods. But Agnes has no wings and the sun at her fingertips, and when she looks up at the sky she wants to pull it closer to her. She is not insignificant, she is not daunted by endless expanses, for her perception of the world is absolute and as such she is always the centre of things.

She is an angel, a messiah and a prophet, a fire shaped into the form of a human.

They like to erase her mother from the ceremony that birthed her, like to pretend she was moulded from the wax of their victims and blessed with life by their God. In this way, she is an idol, and not human at all. 

She is not Icarus, because he was a fool and she is a harbinger, but she’d suit the whole white wings and dripping wax thing. She would wear her pride better because it is deserved, because she was made as something holy and so it is warranted. 

(Icarus’ foolishness was a choice. Agnes has never made a mistake.

Remember; Agnes is not a bird. She does not burn, for her bones are not hollow and her mouth is shaped to fit in rows of teeth, numbering the same as those that were sacrificed to her. Sometimes she thinks she missed the mark when she shaped the details of her face in a forgery of humanity, that she got the ears wrong, that her mouth moves too strangely, that she could never pass for human.)

*

Gertrude doesn’t say much to her in the cafe Agnes will love and has loved in, just stares at her with a cold, arrogant tilt of her chin. She is old now, skin wrinkled like a scrunched-up piece of paper, hands knobbly with age. Her eyes are the same as those that have rooted themself in Agnes' skull. 

Looking at her, it is hard not to see her as the version of the sun Agnes always wanted to be. Burning, punishing, protecting. Warm. 

(Of course, this is a pretty falsehood; Gertrude has stolen every bit of warmth she ever had.)

It is when they are watching a house burn down together that Agnes first speaks to her with honesty, eyes still fixed on the devouring thing in front of them. 

“I used to consider destruction something divine, you know,” she told the Archivist, “An extension of myself, that is. I used to be grateful that I took pleasure in it.”

"Do you still?” Gertrude tilted her head back, eyes black like coals and strangely reflecting in the light of the fire. “I have often wondered if you were fighting against your better nature when you… rebelled, or if you were simply made wrong.”

“Same as you, I suppose. Are we not both fighting against that which nourishes us? Are we not digging our teeth into our own flesh?”

“I do not- at the very least, I never claimed that what I did was _holy,_ ” Gertrude said sharply, lips pulled thin at the perceived slight. Agnes laughed loudly, like there were church bells clanging in her throat and echoing in the chamber of her mouth, like her eyes were stained glass windows. 

“All that I do is holy, don’t you know? Those that I hurt, that I kill, that I love? Even if I love in a way that is wretched and impure it is, in some way, divine.”

“I love you,” Gertrude told her simply, flatly, like it was a statement of fact, “That is not holy. Not when it’s us.”

“Ah, but you love me as something holy, don’t you? We have not spoken but still you proclaim that you would worship the gold-plated idol of me. Is that not holy, to love a messiah?”

“I do not love you as some holy thing and I despise the implication that I do,” Gertrude tells her, straight-backed and stern-faced, “I do not love you because I am tied to you, but because you are alive, and you are doubting, and I want to know your favourite movie. I love you because I can feel the banked press of your anger in my fingertips and your doubt like a fist around my throat. I’m sorry. Please don’t pray for me.” 

Agnes stared at her, outlined against the fire, bent over with age and still burning herself up with all that misplaced righteousness. “That is not love,” she said softly, reaching out gently to touch the edge of her cardigan sleeve, ignoring how it burnt, “If it was I would love you, because I want to know you, because I know the feeling of your mind in my skull and your fingers pressing against my throat. And it would be so dreadfully cruel, to hurt you like that.”

If Agnes had the choice, she would learn the most fragile parts of Gertrude. She would press on the bruises on her wrist and over her heart, spread her hands over her ribs and pretend that within the cage of her fingers Gertrude is safe. 

“Yes,” Gertrude said quietly, “I suppose it would.”

Agnes tilted her head back, eyes tightly shut against the glare of the fire and the look on Gertrude's face, “You’re enjoying this just as much as I am.”

“I do not take pleasure in what I do,” Gertrude tells her, and behind the closed curtain of her eyelids Agnes can imagine the bloodstains she sees on her hands. If she could, Agnes would press kisses to her knuckles and her palm and the knobs of her wrists and pretend that she is absolved of all her sins.

Agnes would do that for her, if she could. Agnes would do that for her, if there wasn’t blood etched into her false youth of her hands, like she hasn’t waited for the smell of suffering to take root in her throat until it crawled onto all her food. 

If she could, Agnes would save them both from the wretched, twisted want that has snaked its way into their flesh. 

“Ah, but is that not your holy mission?” Agnes asks her, voice quiet and silken, “To purge the world of all the crawling decay it houses? To light up all the darkest corners of the world, to reveal all those that are suffering. Do you not feel the rabbit-quick heartbeat when you light a match?”

Gertrude doesn’t speak, and so Agnes laughs again, and pretends that the sound does not tear bloody trenches in her throat. 

*

Gertrude had hugged her once, briefly. It had been blasphemy. Her cardigan had been rough to the touch, and smelt terrible when burnt. When she had peeled away, wrinkled face drawn tight with longing, it had not been a prayer on her lips. Gertrude had never given into what feeds her, for all it cost her a humanity of a different kind. 

Gertrude had screamed, when Agnes had embraced her, had wept in her shoulder. Agnes didn’t say _I told you so then,_ whispers instead when she curls up and cries in her bed. In some ways she was already dead in this moment. In some ways she is only a ghost. _  
_

(Afterwards, Agnes studies the imprints of Gertrude’s fingers on her _waxfleshskin_ and does not think of a lover’s touch.)

*

Agnes had enjoyed her dates with Jack Baranabas. Really enjoyed them, in a way she never really had before. He made her feel, if not human, then earthly, something that could be seen and loved and touched. Maybe that's why that had been that quiet voice in her head saying _what if…_ when she kissed him, like he had somehow tamed the fire that pressed against her skin like a caged animal.

Sometimes Agnes dreamt of holding Jack Barnabas’s face in her hands and not having it melt, of smearing flour on his cheeks and reading a book with him, cold hands turning flammable pages. She might not want a life with him, but she wanted the chance to find that out the normal way. She wanted happy memories.

She wanted his hand in hers unthinkingly, casually. She wanted to step carefully in love with him, wanted laughter and quiet nights and kisses on cheeks and foreheads.

(Her mother had been promised a child with divinity spilling out her fingertips. She had gotten her wish.)

*

It is a terrible thing, to love a G-d, and it is a terrible thing to love a woman who is flesh and bone, but Agnes is neither and so cannot be loved at all. Not in the way that is told of in love songs and poetry, with touches that do not burn and caresses that are not meant to shape but to comfort. 

Jack Barnabas, in a quiet way, might have grown to love her, if she had not given him a preview of what would come of that love, a cinematic moment of burning touch and desecration. If she had not shown him the path her feet had been anchored to, not offered him a glimpse of what it meant to be saved. 

Gertrude had loved her in the way that she loved all her little mysteries, had desired to pick her apart and lay her open. In some ways, she might have wished to kiss Agnes’ forehead or cheek, to see what it would be like to love something holy. In some ways, Agnes had loved her back.

*

Gertrude had looked head-on at her only once in the course of their meeting. In this moment she had not averted her eyes as she did other times, did not focus on the space behind her head. Instead she had met Agnes’s gaze and saw all that she was, not the banked fire at her fingertips but her hands themselves. She saw the places where there should be burnt skin and the bits where Agnes hadn’t shaped her fingers right and the painful humanity in the fragility of her wrists.

Agnes had kept her eyes on the curve of Gertrude’s fingers, wrapped around a mug of slowly cooling tea instead of clasped in prayer. She did not meet her eyes, which were familiar from hazy glimpses in bathroom mirrors, except for that one, blessed moment. She did not think of how brittle she seemed. She did not think of touch. 

Gertrude had aged with all the fires she set, while Agnes stayed stilled in time and burning all she touched with smoke in her throat. 

The last glimpse of her is framed in her head like a picture of a saint; Gertrude, face upturned to look at Emma Harvey’s house go up in flames. The expression on her face had been one of longing that Agnes could not place. 

She imagined it felt like something like the ache in her ribcage, and the hurt that nestled in the palm of her hand. 

Of course, she did not feel. She marched endlessly onwards, to the bright and beautiful future she would bring about. 

(Once, she had listened to Jack’s breathing in the dark in that last moment before sleep, when they had fallen asleep on the couch after watching a movie together. Agnes kept this memory wrapped up in her chest, close to her lungs. When the smoke began to choke her, the memory of him helped her breathe.)

*

Raymond Fielding was bound up in a web that clung to his fingertips and wrapped around his tongue. He had been the one to teach her to love the Mother’s creatures, those scurrying webs and bloated copies of spiders. Agnes had never truly taken to the gentle, maternal touch of spiders scurrying across her skin, for all her shoulders were draped in the silken cloak of the Web.

He had also been the one to braid Agnes’ hair every night, quick fingers and quick tongue as he told her what it was to be kind, and talked of houses and bindings with his fingers trembling in fear. 

_It is a horrible thing,_ he has said to a girl who had blood on her hands and under her nails and inside her wax palms and wax eyes, _to tie yourself to something else. It is not love. Houses cannot love, but they can hate, and they can shelter. And the Mother can weave and twist but she cannot-_

He had stopped then, hands stilling. Agnes had wanted to burn him so she could shift through his ashes and find out the end of the sentence, like the knowledge would free her. 

But this was a fragile moment, and a rare one, and even if Agnes could taste his fear like smoke on her tongue she did not press at the open wound of it, not even to test how sweet his blood might be.

(Sometimes Agnes imagined her love was like a bird, but that is far too fragile for her, an indulgence that does suit someone who has a Watcher’s eyes in her head. Instead it is stolen as that moment was, twisted with the sour taste of fear.)

*

Agnes’ wings were not burnt off when she fell from grace. Wax did not drip and distort and bind. This would have been a sacrifice, an appeasement to her god, a half-written apology for leaving.

Instead she sat at a cafe, and went on a date, and _thought this one is different_ until he was screaming under her hands and she thought for a moment to mould her face like wax. 

Jack Barnabas had told her he didn’t believe in a destiny or a higher power. Agnes had not told him that there are bindings around her wrist like that of a marionette. She did not tell him that her mother had been complicit in the crafting of her destiny, that she looked at him and saw only ashes.

She did not tell him that her destiny had been sealed when she first smiled at another’s final cry. 

(Here is the thing, a fundamental truth written into holy books and etched into the wood of pyres; angels do not sit in coffee shops, wax wings melted to their backs, and fall in love.

Here is another truth; if she was truly a winged-thing, Agnes would have torn out her feathers one by one and laid them at the feet of anyone who would take them. In this way, she would be free to love them, to shape her lips around the words that rest on her tongue like crystallised honey.)

*

Divinity burns in her throat like smoke, and when she coughs it is not pain but holiness that burns her throat, acrid on her tongue. When she speaks every syllable is broken, filled with some bright holiness, some hidden commandment.

It’s strange, how many commandments Agnes seems to have given. She can’t remember half of them really, but it is said that she spoke, and so she did. 

It had been a man who bought her the sacrifice this time, the same one who would transform flesh into purified tallow and capture a dying scream in the wick of a candle. The candles had never been quite as good as the sufferings she’d forged herself in when she was a child, slowly building her fire. 

(The sweetest had been when lost her temper, acted quickly, thoughtlessly stifling that bright light of potential and drinking it into herself.)

Every time she took a life she could feel her touch get hotter, could feel her will slipping from her finger like it was fighting against her. In later years she would breathe in smoke until the taste of it got too sweet for her, and she locked them in a cupboard and dug her fingers into the wax of her tongue.

*

There’s a box of letters she’s never sent under her bed, telling Gertrude every mundane detail of her existence. 

In the only letter she sends, Agnes writes; _I want to make a home in the skeleton of you, to fill your very structure with the knowledge that you are loved, that you rest in my collarbone like something precious, that my heart fits securely in the palm of your hand. You would cradle it, I know, though sometimes I wish you would eat it so I could kiss the blood off your lips and pretend that the divinity I taste there comes from you. I think then that I will know the whole of you, that if I could nest within your skull I might have a chance to know your thoughts. Perhaps this would fill the hunger in my stomach, the one I have grown myself around._

Agnes writes; _My favourite movie is the Prestige, if you really want to know_ and replaces the title with a burn mark. She does not want gertrude to know her more than she already does, more than she can find it within herself to give. 

*

Agnes had been bound to two things in her life, truthfully, because being made does not count as being bound. One was a woman, with her human hands and human anger and human cruelty. The other was a gaping whole in the fabric of reality, a scar so deep it had become far too entrenched to ever heal. Both had been gifts from the web, a ring in a far off wood and a hand that did not rot or change. 

In other terms, a house. The ordinary kind, if you think about it. Houses always entrap you in some way, locking you in with the smoke behind you and in your throat, with the spiders that merrily spin their webs in forgotten corners and drop into open, snoring mouths.

It was, considering this, only natural that her death was the final nail in the coffin, a shattering of delicate trappings of the world around her. A distortion perhaps, but the Spiral had nothing to do with it. Instead it was a warping, a scarring, a burning of all that supported the reality of the place. The world bent around the impossibility of her existence. 

Agnes died with Raymond Fielding’s hand tied to her belt. It was the same one that shied from touching her, the same one that had grasped tables and door handles and the wood of the lurking thing that called itself a house. 

Agnes could still remember the exact smell of Raymond Fielding burning, the crackle of flames as his house crumbled. She could still remember the twist of Gertrude’s smile and the tone of her voice, harsh and regretful. Cold in the Agnes had always been when you took away her stolen warmth and the fireworks of her touch. 

Her spark returned. The doubt was not intrinsic to it, the way it had been shaped was not the will of the Lightless Flame but that of humans, fragile and immaterial. The warmth of it was not built in, and would be burned in. Her doubt would be burnt out, and she would be pure, wings outstretched and shining.

They would try again. They would burn all else down, and baptise the world so it was pure and agonising. 

*

A letter Agnes never sent reads like this:

Dear Gertrude Robinson,

_I think, if given a chance, I would like to know you._

_If given a chance, I would build a birds nest in the skeleton of you so I can strengthen your bones, so you can gorge yourself on me and then let me pick apart the remains of your heart with my claws like the blood on our tongues will absolve us. I do not claim this as love but as the possibility of it, the simple fact that consuming is the only way I have of knowing, that the ashes are all that are left once I have seen._

_But we didn’t get a second chance, or even a first chance. I do not get choices. I was not raised to love, for my love can only save and that is a terrible thing._

_And yet I want so badly for you to look at my face cradled in your hands so that you may love me, so that you may see me, so that I may know a kindness other than worship and a confession of love that is not a prayer. I want a quiet love, not a religion. I want you in the most selfish way I know._

_There has been a hunger in my bones, a structural flaw I fear I may cave around. In recent years, I fear this is what a lack of touch has caused, wearing my away until I am just flimsy plaster over rotten wood. In recent years, I fear that I want you. In recent years, I fear I want to shape my lips around whatever words I please, even if they are unholy, even if I want to let impure things grow in my chest._

_There is nothing to change. My path is written in the holiest books there are, and yet I want._

_I want a garden, though I know my fire would burn it just like it will burn all other gardens, when I purify the world._

_I wonder if there is something impure, in flowers and trees. Some sickness that bleeds into their roots. An infection. A disease. I was made to root it out, I know, yet still I want to study them, to eat berries until my fingers are sticky, to kneel on dirt and help things grow._

_Maybe I’d keep bees so I could gather honey on my fingertips and eat it without the bitter aftertaste of smoke.  
_

_If I drew a map of myself I wonder how much of me you would take up, where you would watch the workings of me from; my heart? my mind? the spider-thin veins of my hands, the marrow of my bones? Perhaps you are all of that. Perhaps you have consumed me, perhaps you are the stutter in my heart and the noose around my throat and the tremble of my hands as I doubt._

_I want to cut you out, to tear you free as if you are a parasite, but I fear I would come away only with feathers sticky with honey. You would taste sweet on my tongue, Gertrude, I know that._

_Holy things do not want impurities such as you, such as the gaze of you, the warmth of you. If they want at all they want for things their Gd would smile on; prayer, confession, absolution, a husband._

_A purified world, one without the press of growing things against the earth._

_There’s a bird outside my window today, Gertrude. I’m thinking of burning it’s nest. Instead of this I think I will begin consuming myself, building a pyre to lay myself on like that they built for my mother so only I will burn instead of the world. It’s an odd thing, to want to hurt someone. I know the feeling well._

_I think I’m going to try again. I think I’m going to stop, to run out the clock that’s been ticking all this time. I think I’m tired, and lost, and my wings are melting to my back and I failed and I doubted and I tried to pretend that I had a choice.  
_

_I didn’t want this, which I think was the problem all along, that I can want and not want._

*

Agnes was found dead in her apartment two days after writing her final letter. There was nobody to mourn her in the entirety of her, though Jack wept and Gertrude tried. 

Such is the fate of messiahs. Such is the fate of trapped and bound things, birds carefully caged and butterflies pinned to cases. 

There was nothing she could do, in the end. 

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading! if you want to chat you can find me at @lesbianbirds on tumblr. 
> 
> agnes is never compared to an angel in the show, but i'm cool and sexy and can do whatever i want. this is going to be really fucking embarrassing to read in a few years time!


End file.
